Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

The minister says that he will mention that because he has no record of his own in environmental protection to talk about. It is going to be a very long 10 minutes for this minister to try and talk about environmental protection over nine very short months.

This government is not content just to shut down environmental programs. It is also intent on shutting down community voices. We have seen this in so many different forums. This government is absolutely committed to shutting down strong, independent, expert and community voices. One of the first decisions that this government took was to entirely defund, from a Commonwealth perspective, the environmental defenders offices. This was a program that endured right through the Howard government. These offices are made up essentially of volunteers who provide legal advice to community groups who wish to object to developments in their community. What did this government do? It completely defunded them because the last thing this government wants—the last thing this Prime Minister wants—is a strong, independent, community voice voicing opposition to something that this government wants.

This fortnight, in the World Heritage Committee, we have seen the culmination of a couple of very serious problems that this government has around environmental protection. I am sure the member for Watson will address one of these issues in far more detail than I have time to. Last night, we saw the World Heritage Committee dismiss out of hand one of the most bizarre applications we have ever seen from the Commonwealth of Australia, a country that has been a responsible, leading citizen of the World Heritage system for the 40 years since it became only the seventh nation to join the World Heritage convention. It is a bizarre application to delist 70,000 hectares, which rightly has been dismissed out of hand by the World Heritage Committee, and it follows on from a decision by the World Heritage Committee only last week which called on this government to postpone and to hold back on the handover of environmental protection powers to state and local governments because it might impact on the Great Barrier Reef. This government has not even bothered to respond to that decision by the World Heritage Committee. There has been no response that I have seen to the World Heritage Committee's call to postpone the handover of environmental protection powers to state and local governments. Instead, what we saw was this government persisting in bringing forward legislation in blatant disregard of the committee's recommendation—an ultimate decision to push legislation through to hand over the environmental protection powers. It is the culmination of an appalling record on environmental protection.

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